Conflict Of Interest In Social Media

Part A

The globalized and highly technological world market is nowadays creating a new environment for the business activities. The use of new technologies allows the companies to reach their customers in an easier way. Furthermore, the innovative technologies provide the businesses with more opportunities in terms of entering into contact with the stakeholders and satisfying the highest revenues. Among the new technologies that reshape business functioning all around the world, social media have developed to be an important means for communication with customers and a powerful marketing tool. Speaking of the importance of implication of modern technologies to the process of managing a business, the introduction of social media into the working

In consideration of the issue, the conflict of interest arises between the wish of the customers to use an application without advertising and the wish of businesses to have an opportunity to use the messenger for their marketing needs and sending advertisements. According to some considerations, the conflict of interests might appear useful for the company. However, in most cases, the conflict of interest “undermines trust” and ultimately tends to reduce the revenue (Lawrence & Weber 101). Nevertheless, with reference to the rights method of ethical reasoning and the identification of the right for privacy as the core human right, privacy of the users should be a primary concern of WhatsApp managers. Besides, identification of the right to privacy as the fundamental human rights supported by both international and national law systems, keeping privacy is the primary task of the company (Rotenberg). In addition, the normative stakeholder theory claims that “management must give equal consideration to the interests of all stakeholders and, when these interests conflict, manage the business so as to attain the optimal balance among them” (Hasnas). Respectively, WhatsApp has found optimal decision by allowing the users to opt out of sharing data with Facebook. However, problematic is that nothing

On the one hand, they are expected to gain benefits from allowing the companies to use their service for advertising and marketing aims and to reach the consumers in this way. On the other hand, they may experience losses of users due to the change of privacy policy and the principle of activities. Their actions with respect to this could also take two different directions. They can either refuse from the announced idea and turn back to previous conditions of work or to proceed with the change. In the first case, they will keep their users and the satisfaction with the functioning of an application. In the second situation, they will be obliged to lose the predicted income and to experience less evident growth. In this case, they would keep already existing customers and their image as of an ethical